Archive: 5 September – 11 September 2005

Because the Guardian is relaunching tomorrow. The paper is changing shape and size, and will be a snazzy full-colour piece of hardcore design work.

As a result of the shift, Online will be changing too - something that Victor Keegan mentioned in his final column as editor of the technology section. Keep your eyes peeled for what's coming up.

Vic's still going strong, by the way, and all day he's been following developments around our Farringdon Road HQ on our new Guardian editors' blog. If you get sweaty looking at pictures of staff members in increasingly declining states of mental fortitude, then you're in for a treat.

Over at Poynter Online, they've marked the first anniversary of Rathergate, the weblog-firestorm that enveloped the CBS anchor.

I think it's interesting that Rathergate has become known as the big story that first put weblogs on the news-media map. Indeed, weblogs played a key role in publicizing that story, and in keeping it visible. But Rathergate didn't start in a blog.

So does Dan Rather dispute count as the breakthrough for bloggers? The most zealous end of the anti-Mainstream Media would like to think they were there earlier: Andrew Sullivan would likely claim the Jayson Blair affair for bloggers, and certainly Trent Lott's resignation was. That was back in late 2002.

Last week, Motorola launched what is probably one of the first hundred phones to have a built in music player... but the first associated with Apple's iTunes. In The Observer, John Naughton blames its underwhelming reception on Apple protecting its iPod franchise:

The real significance of the iPhone is the way it illustrates why companies find it hard to innovate. The difficulty stems from a simple, unpalatable fact - namely that radical innovation generally threatens your existing business model. Or, in MBA-speak, it cannibalises your core business.

The iPhone is considerably less than the sum of its parts for one reason: it was designed by a company that has become a prisoner of its previous success at innovation.

Apple's lucrative discovery and exploitation of online music transformed its image and its corporate prospects. But the assets it acquired in the process are now so valuable it would be corporate madness to do anything that might undermine them. And yet that is precisely what radical innovation would achieve. So Apple cannot do it.

Comment: Odd that John Naughton apparently thinks iTunes was the first legal music download service, considering that Peter Gabriel founded OD2 in 1999. My possibly flaky memory suggests that Listen.com, Pressplay and MusicNet were also out before iTunes....

Brushed Metal: I'm the bad-ass theme. I'm the one who flouts the Human Interface Guidelines.

Mike: This guy trashes the HIG the way Johnny Depp trashes a hotel room. He even sports a custom radius on his window corners. No other window on the system has a shape like this. It's wild. Just wait until the HIG zealots get a load of this guy.

Brushed Metal: I told you something was fucked up when the new version of Mail didn't go with me.

"Visit Bill in his office for a few minutes to talk about where he sees the future going. This is a fun interview, prepares you for the PDC that's coming next week. It's going to be a fun next week, make sure to come back on Tuesday when we'll have tons of videos from teams showing off their secret stuff for the first time. Next Tuesday morning not only will his keynote at the Professional Developer Conference be broadcast live (it'll be on Bill's webcasts page on Tuesday), but we'll have a bunch of videos all week long."

"Mobile phone users or iPod addicts could soon be spared the hassle of having to recharge batteries by a backpack that converts energy from walking into electricity," reports CNN.

"Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania devised the technology after being asked by the U.S. military to come up with a light rechargeable battery that could be used by troops one the battlefield."

CNN has a photo of Professor Larry Rome, who led the research, wearing the power-generating backpack. So how does it work?

The backpack consists of bag suspended from a fixed frame by vertical springs. As the bag is moved up and down by the wearer's walking motion it creates enough mechanical energy to drive a generator mounted on the frame.

"Cerf will remain chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the oversight agency for Internet domain names. He also will continue as a visiting scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he has been focusing on a very Google-like project — trying to figure out a way to connect the Internet to outer space."

Comment: Vint's site, Cerf's Up, is always worth a read. (Presumably it will move from his previous employer, MCI.)

I did a big interview with Cerf for Online, here, published on November 9, 2000. He's a hero.

I showed the new iPod nano off to various people around the office this afternoon, to gauge their first thoughts and reactions:

Roger, the paper's deputy art director, couldn't wait to have a look. "It's very attractive, just like a piece of jewellery, really. It's much more like a piece of jewellery than other iPods... that makes it more and more desirable. I just hope it lasts longer than my iPod mini, which was crap."

Danielle, Online's administrator for the week and our demonstration model (above), was impressed, but worried about getting the unit grimy. "It sounds just as good," she said. "It would do my head in, though: I'd be constantly cleaning it."

Neil, the assistant editor of Guardian Unlimited - and a man whose immaculately manicured hands can be seen above - is already thinking of splashing out. "Don't tell me wife, but I'm going to buy one," he whispered. "Maybe two." Sorry, mate, but the secret's out.

Hadley, who's the Guardian's deputy fashion editor, offered a considered fashionista's view. "It's so cool: I can fit it in a cigarette packet! It's smaller than a pack of 10."

A straw poll of feedback from around the office basically distilled down into: "Wow, that's small. But will I break it?".

"One of the earliest and perhaps clearest alarms about Hurricane Katrina's potential threat to New Orleans was sounded not by the Weather Channel or a government agency but by a self-described weather nerd sitting on a couch in Indiana with a laptop computer and a remote control," reports The New York Times's tech blog.

"At the risk of being alarmist, we could be 3-4 days away from an unprecedented cataclysm that could kill as many as 100,000 people in New Orleans," Brendan Loy, who is 23 and has no formal meteorological training, wrote on Aug. 26 in his blog, irishtrojan.com. "If I were in New Orleans, I would seriously consider getting the hell out of Dodge right now, just in case."

Comment: The NYT piece has a correction that might amuse our own readers' editor. It says: An article in Business Day about Brendon Loy, the Notre Dame student who was one of the earliest to sound the alarm about the potential threat to New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, misstated the name of Mr Loy's dog. It is Robbie, not Becky (which is his fiancée's name).

Not-so-amusing footnote: Loy's blog account has been suspended, and the page currently puts up a notice that says: "Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible."

"The LexisNexis data collection service has introduced CopyGuard, a program aimed at exposing plagiarists or spotting copyright infringement. According to John Barrie, chief executive of iParadigms, the company that developed the program with LexisNexis, CopyGuard can generate a report that calculates the percentage of material suspected of not being original, highlights that text and pinpoints its possible original source, all within seconds," reports The New York Times.

"Existing programs from iParadigm and others have focused on plagiarism by students, not journalists. CopyGuard, which is available by subscription (the company would not divulge the price of the service) draws on LexisNexis's database of more than six billion documents and several years' worth of Web pages archived by iParadigm. In addition to checking newspaper and magazine articles, CopyGuard can be used by publishers to scan book manuscripts."

Overall, in my tests, the iPod nano performed as advertised, or better. I found no significant flaws or downsides. The only quirks are that the headphone jack is on the bottom, because there isn't room for it on the top; and to make room for the jack, the standard iPod connector port that hooks up to many accessories has been placed off-center. But neither of these oddities matters much. In fact, the bottom-mounted headphone jack makes the optional lanyard earbuds possible, and keeps the screen oriented properly when you're wearing them.

Despite its small size, the nano sounded as good as any other iPod, and is packed with plenty of audio power. Plugged into my car speakers, it was able to belt out the new Fountains of Wayne rocker, "Maureen," loudly enough to be heard perfectly, even though I was going 70 mph in a convertible with the top down.

"EBay Inc is in talks to acquire Internet-telephony company Skype Technologies SA for $2 billion to $3 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, in a deal that would represent a dramatic shift in strategy for the world's largest online auction site," reports The Wall Street Journal [paid subscription required].

The Journal says talks "could fall apart," and that Skype "has been in active discussions with other technology companies, and none has led to a deal". However, it adds:

While other online leaders such as Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. have pushed the boundaries of their offerings, eBay has stuck more directly to the business of acting as middleman between individual buyers and sellers. But the person familiar with the situation said that eBay is keen on adding services that make it easier for its customers to buy and sell goods online, as it did when it acquired the electronic-payment processing service PayPal in 2002.

Comment: eBay hasn't folllowed Google, Yahoo and even Amazon (with its A9 search engine) in expanding into new areas, but it's not clear that buying Skype would do that either. After all, eBay has not made PayPal into a web-dominating online payment system, and nowadays it seems to be used mainly on eBay. Would Skype go the same way? If so, it doesn't represent "represent a dramatic shift in strategy," just more of the same.

This Thursday marks the last edition of Online as we know it. As the Guardian relaunches next week, we'll be bringing you bigger, better and more extensive technology coverage. But don't miss out on the what we've got in store this week...

In our leading comment Online's editor, Victor Keegan, explains what's changed in the 11 years since the Guardian launched Online, and wonders where it will all end up.

Elsewhere, we're wondering about the future of Google. We put the questions to a series of technology insiders and Google watchers - including Jeff Jarvis, Opera's Jon von Tetzchner and digital activist Cory Doctorow - to see what they thought.

I've traversed the wilder areas of our fair capital and now I'm sitting back at home gawping over the fact that England managed to lose to Northern Ireland Nil. But enough of that... the ride back gave me a little time to think more about the launches we saw fromAppletonight, and what they mean in the long term.

While at the event I had a brief chat with Danika Cleary, the iPod product manager, who was in town for a bit of gladhanding. Danika's the kind of enthusiastic Apple employee who is very convinced of what she does, but she was adamant that the company has stolen a march on the opposition with iPod nano. And she's right, at least in part. It was clear from the reaction of the crowd (and the reaction I've had from friends) that nano is a seriously cool piece of kit. When the iPod mini - now the most successful iPod there is - came out, it was a small, fashion-conscious way of getting the brand out into the wild. The nano takes this much further. It replaces the mini completely, and then some. Continue reading...

Apologies for taking so long to get a picture: the network connection here is *extremely* slow.

Anyway: the nano - it's a sleek wee beasty, that's for sure.

The unique selling point of the iPod nano has to be how small it is. The unit is tiny - the size of a credit card, and hardly much thicker - and it comes with a colour screen. Now I'm out of the bullpen auditorium where we were being broadcast Steve Jobs's speech, I'm able to get some more details: it comes in two sizes, 2GB and 4GB, for £139 and £179 respectively. That's approximately twice the price of an iPod shuffle.

And that's where the design comes from: it's clearly learnt the lessons of shuffle (it feels stronger, more robust and has a shiny metal back), and has brought the tiny player a little bit of pazzazz from its bigger brothers and sisters (the touch-sensitive click wheel, for example).

The unit is light - perhaps too light (I fear I'd lose or break it) and the screen is small, but clear. It comes with a traditional iPod USB 30-pin connector, meaning that it *should* be compatible with many existing accessories, and they're claiming up to 14 hours battery life. Everything else is standard iPod fare, so if you've already seen one or own one, you should know what to expect.

The phone, on the other hand, is not very exciting. A push button with a little iTunes sign on launches the iPod-style interface that lets you listen to the 512MB of music you've transferred over from your computer. To be honest, it's not worth writing that much about, because it's probably everything you expected.

When Jobs was announcing the iPod Nano, he took the chance of a few swipes at Apple's rivals. He pretended not to have a clue about companies like Creative (shome mishtake shurely?). And the iPod, he said, has shifted 6m units across the world in the last quarter, whereas Sony's PSP has only sold 2m.

That's rather disingenuous for a couple of reasons: the PSP was only released in Europe (one of the most important markets) last week, and the iPod has a much wider range of price points (it's got at least three distinct ranges). But it's as fair a comparison as can be made under the circumstances, I suppose.

But forget the talk: the Nano - which comes in white or black - does look like a sleek piece of kit. I'll try and get some pictures for you as soon as I can... there's nothing on the Apple website yet, but I'm on the case. Now we're going to have a hands-on demo.

Dude, that was a bit of a curveball. Here I was, tapping away on my laptop when suddenly Jobs whipped a tiny little thing out of his trousers. Stop sniggering at the back, you lot... it was an iPod. The "iPod nano", to be precise.

Not much time to tell you what we're being shown right now, but here are the vital stats as I get them:

They've just brought Kanye West on for a bit of celeb power... and I'm sure he just said some rather naughty words about things he might want to do to the police. I doubt that fits with Apple's somewhat clean-cut, evangelical image.

"Sony will begin selling from October a network base-station that can stream live television and other video content through a home network or across the Internet to remote PCs," reports IDG News Service.

The Location Free Base Station is an extension of the company's Location Free TV system, which until now has required the use of dedicated portable displays. The new system will work with normal PCs.

The LF-PK1 unit can stream video to PCs both inside and outside of the home, or wherever it is located. Local clients connect via either a wired link or wirelessly through the unit's built-in wireless LAN access point. From outside the home, access is possible as long as the device is connected to a broadband Internet link.

As the article points out later, this isn't a completely new idea:

Closest to Sony's new system is the Slingbox, from Sling Media. This $250 device works in a similar way and can stream TV to Windows PCs running dedicated software. Another company, Orb Networks, offers an all-software system that runs on a PC at home and can be remotely accessed from a PC, PDA, or smart phone.

Comment: Sony's system works with PCs running Microsoft Windows 2000 SP4 or XP -- what the story above calls "normal PCs". Both Slingox and Orb require PCs running Windows XP.

So, if all the rumours are true, Steve Jobs will tonight announce the long-awaited iTunes-compatible phone which Apple has been making in conjunction with Motorola. Later on today I'll be going to a north London satellite link-up with San Francisco, where we'll hear more details: and I'll (hopefully) be blogging live from the scene.

But forget the hype: has it been too long?

After all, it's been more than a year since we knew this was on the cards. And a host of other music phones have hit the market in the meantime: many of them are quite good, and they're improving all the time.

In my opinion, Apple's really going to have to pull something special out of the bag. While it might look good (and Motorola's regained its status as a highly fashionable handset manufacturer, so I expect it to), the crucial aspect is going to be who actually wants it, and the restrictions placed on the music on the phone itself.

And here's the rub, for me at least: mobile networks already place highly restrictive digital rights mechanisms on downloaded music. Apple's likely to be enforcing its iTMS DRM on the phone, at a time when there's little inter-compatibility between songs I've downloaded on my phone and songs I've got on my larger music collections. Add to this the fact that there's also little inter-compatibility between different manufacturers. And if I switch phones (which happens regularly), I lose all the music - and all the money I've spent. If I'm going to be persuaded to buy an iPhone, I want all of these issues resolved.

Ease-of-use will be paramount, and it has to be said that iTunes is one of the easiest ways to buy music... but will that draw in enough new business? After all, if Apple's merely going to succeed in getting people *already* using the iPod/iTunes combo to switch from, say, their underperforming iPod shuffle, then I don't think it will have been worth the effort. We want something special... but can Apple deliver?

A new Trojan monitors access to porn sites and then displays a quote from the Koran chastising the surfer for his or her sins, a security vendor said Tuesday," reports Gregg Keizer of TechWeb News.

Once it's installed, Yusufali.a -- called "Cager.a" by Trend Micro -- watches which sites Windows users visit by examining the browser's title bar. If the Trojan sees a word in its list -- such as "teen," "xx," "sex," or "penis" -- it minimizes the window and displays a quote from the Koran.

"Yusufali: Know, therefore, that there is no god but Allah, and ask forgiveness for they fault, and for the men and women who believe: for Allah knows how ye move about and how ye dwell in your homes."

"Little is left to chance in the brave new world of parking technology: Meters are triggered by remote sensors, customers pay for street time by cell phone and solar-powered vending machines create customized parking plans for the motorist," reports AP.

"If you're in Monterey, Calif., or Chicago, you're apt to be foiled by parking officials who drive minicarts outfitted with GPS-enabled cameras that scan your license plate and know how long a car has occupied the given space."

"Internet file-swapping was dealt a fresh blow today after an Australian court ordered the world's largest file-sharing service to filter out copyrighted material from its network," reports Guardian Unlimited.

The ruling, by Australia's federal court, found file-sharing copyrighted material over the network was illegal. "Both the user who makes the file available and the user who downloads a copy infringes the owner's copyright," the ruling stated.

The judgment against Sharman Networks, Kazaa's Sydney-based owners, is a further blow to internet file-swapping and follows a series of adverse rulings in recent months.

Although Australian courts do not have jurisdiction overseas, their rulings customarily influence the development of law in other commonwealth countries, including Britain.